Adtech and Online Trackers Negatively Affecting Retail Website Performance, Reports Ghostery

Retail Website

Ghostery, the digital intelligence company known for its free browser extension that makes your web browsing experience cleaner, faster and safer, released new research identifying the measurable impact that trackers have on retail websites and found that ad-tech stacks are hurting performance and ultimately negatively affecting customer experiences when shopping online.

The findings are according to Ghostery’s 2019 Retail Tracker Tax Report, which used Ghostery Insights to analyze the specific tracker stack of 12 retailers’ websites to expose the hidden cost of certain trackers, to illustrate a site’s performance potential and help businesses make more informed decisions about their tracker ecosystem.

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The Tracker Impact

Ghostery found that many retail websites in this study suffered from frivolous trackers that were found to negatively impact customer experiences. Some of the worst-performing websites belonged to Everlane, Footlocker and Urban Outfitters, which all had the biggest discrepancies between default load time (load time with all trackers in place) and load time with trackers blocked – with a difference between load times of 6 seconds, 5 seconds and 5 seconds, respectively. Although these three retailers did not have relatively high numbers of trackers on their websites among those analyzed, the trackers they did have were attacking performance.

When taking a closer look at the types of trackers that were found to have the biggest impact on website performance, six trackers were major offenders, including DoubleClick, Facebook Connect, Adobe, Tealium, Adroll, and Integral Ad Science. While each of these trackers serves a variety of purposes – such as advertising and functionality – and can be helpful to a retailer’s e-commerce marketing strategy, they contributed the most to slowing down webpage load time.

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Additional key findings:

  • Piggy-backing trackers lead to poor performance: Macy’s was found to have a decent difference in default and optimal page load speed (2 seconds), which is likely being caused by the astounding 42 piggy-backed trackers discovered on its website. These are trackers that are let onto a site not by direct implementation but rather through another tracker, potentially unknown to the retailer, and out of their control – slowing down websites and putting consumer privacy at risk.
  • Post-load trackers cause delays: Sears was a unique case study, which had the highest number of trackers at 85 and 318 tracker requests. Most of their trackers actually did not fire a request until the page had finished loading. The effects of post-load trackers can be harmful on a website and result in delayed scrolling and forms that are slow to respond, among other glitches, which could have an overall negative effect on any customer’s online shopping experience.

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“Hungry to capture consumer attention, retailers spend billions of dollars on digital advertising, which only increases during the holiday shopping season due to mounting pressure to hit end-of-year sales numbers, “ said Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery president. “Our study confirms that retailers need to better understand the costs and benefits of their tracker ecosystems to not only create a better online shopping experience for consumers but to also improve their bottom line. While trackers can be valuable, retailers must ask themselves – at what cost? Businesses often focus solely on the benefits of trackers but fail to consider the hidden costs that come with them.”

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